When a Celebrity Endorsement Becomes a Reputation Liability

BRAND RISK

When a Celebrity Endorsement Becomes a Reputation Liability

Sydney Sweeney's “Just Sports” campaign gave Novig exactly what advertising is supposed to buy: attention. The harder question is what kind.

A woman sits on a basketball hoop.

Footballs cover her chest.

A hockey stick, tennis racket and baseball bat appear in succession.

The word “sports” is repeated until there is little doubt about the joke.

Then comes the pitch.

“Novig is just sports.”

It was supposed to be simple.

Instead, within days, Sydney Sweeney and sports-prediction platform Novig found themselves in the middle of a much larger argument about women, sport, advertising and the difference between getting noticed and being respected.

Novig launched the national “Just Sports” campaign on 9 September 2026.

The company's stated idea was to distinguish itself from prediction markets that allow trading on politics, entertainment and other events.

Novig wanted to be known as the platform concerned exclusively with sport.

Sweeney did not merely accept a conventional endorsement cheque.

Novig announced that she had joined the company as a{" "} strategic partner and equity holder.

In the company's launch announcement, Sweeney described the campaign as an attempt to cut through the noise with confidence, humour and a playful edge.

It certainly cut through the noise.

What happened next demonstrates one of the uncomfortable truths of modern reputation:

visibility travels faster than explanation.

The people objecting weren't advertising critics

The strongest criticism did not initially come from columnists debating whether the commercial was tasteful.

It came from women who actually compete in sport.

Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus, a four-time Olympic gold medallist, described the campaign as a “kick in the face” to women who had spent their lives perfecting their sporting ability.

Her objection was broader than nudity.

She questioned why, after years of women fighting to have athletic performance taken seriously, a woman's body was again being used commercially to represent sport.

British sprinter Amy Hunt responded after competing at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship.

She used a BBC interview to contrast the advertisement with what elite female sport actually looks like:

Muscles. Hard work. Blood. Sweat. Tears.

World champion boxer Skye Nicolson drew another distinction.

Her argument was not that female athletes should avoid femininity or appearing attractive.

It was that there is a difference between an athlete looking sexy and{" "} using sex to sell sport.

Other athletes and sports organisations joined the criticism, posting training and competition footage around the idea:

This is what a woman in sport looks like.

The dispute had moved beyond one actress and one advertisement.

It had become an argument about representation.

Was it actually an advert about women's sport?

That is where the controversy becomes more complicated.

Novig's position was that the campaign was not designed to represent female athletes.

Sweeney is an actress promoting a sports-focused prediction platform.

She was not presenting herself as an Olympic swimmer, professional runner or elite boxer.

Some defenders therefore argued that criticism of the campaign conflated a woman choosing to present herself sexually with the sexualisation of women athletes.

Others pointed out that prominent athletes themselves have appeared nude or semi-nude in editorial photography.

Sweeney appeared to gesture toward that history by sharing images from ESPN's former Body Issue, which featured athletes including Serena Williams, Megan Rapinoe and Ronda Rousey.

But critics saw an important distinction.

The ESPN photographs presented the athletes' bodies as consequences of extraordinary athletic performance.

Strength, musculature, movement and the physical demands of elite sport were the subject.

Novig's campaign used sporting equipment around the body of an actress to sell a commercial platform.

Whether that distinction matters is at the centre of the disagreement.

The advertisement may have worked

There is another uncomfortable possibility.

Novig may have achieved exactly what it wanted.

Before the campaign, the company was relatively little known outside sports-prediction and trading circles.

After the campaign, major news outlets and millions of social-media users were suddenly discussing it.

Reporting this week found that Novig's mentions across major social platforms rose by more than ninefold after the campaign launched.

But another number was more revealing.

Only a small proportion of posts discussing the controversy actually mentioned Novig itself.

In other words, millions of people might remember:

Sydney Sweeney covered with sports equipment.

They may not remember the company she was advertising.

This is where publicity and reputation begin separating from each other.

A provocative campaign can solve an awareness problem almost overnight.

It cannot guarantee what that awareness becomes associated with.

Attention is not the same thing as reputation

For decades, marketing operated around a comforting proposition:

being talked about is better than being ignored.

Social media has made that proposition much harder to defend.

Today's advertisement does not end when the media buy ends.

It becomes a clip.

The clip becomes a reaction.

The reaction becomes another video.

An athlete responds.

A journalist reports the response.

Another creator reacts to the journalist.

Algorithms discover that the disagreement is keeping people watching and push the argument further.

The company that originally purchased the advertisement is no longer controlling the advertisement.

Millions of strangers are.

By 18 September, the debate was still producing fresh coverage rather than disappearing from the news cycle.

That matters because the reputational consequences of an endorsement can outlive its commercial objectives.

Sweeney isn't merely the face of this one

There is another detail that changes the analysis.

Sweeney is not simply the talent hired to appear in an advertisement.

She is a strategic partner and equity holder in Novig.

That makes the familiar defence —

the celebrity is just being paid to read somebody else's script

— much less straightforward.

The interests of celebrity and company are more closely connected.

Sweeney's own reputation can benefit if Novig succeeds.

Novig's reputation can benefit from Sweeney's fame.

The reputational risk also travels in both directions.

That raises a question brands increasingly need to consider before attaching themselves to high-profile individuals:

Are you borrowing someone's reach, or are you borrowing their reputation too?

Usually, it is both.

Reputation works in both directions

Celebrity endorsement is normally discussed as reputation flowing in one direction.

The famous person lends credibility, desirability or recognition to the company.

A sportswear brand borrows an athlete's achievement.

A cosmetics company borrows an actor's beauty.

A technology company borrows an entrepreneur's authority.

But association works backwards as well.

The celebrity acquires part of the company's reputation.

The company acquires part of the celebrity's.

Agencies, executives, investors and even customers can become connected to the resulting controversy.

That exchange can be enormously valuable when the reputations reinforce one another.

It becomes considerably more complicated when they do not.

Novig wanted sports obsessiveness.

Sweeney brought celebrity, sexuality and reach.

Female athletes interpreted the resulting combination very differently.

All three things can be true simultaneously.

So was the campaign a success?

That depends entirely on what is being measured.

If the measurement is attention, Novig received an extraordinary amount of it.

If the measurement is brand recognition, early reporting suggests the campaign substantially increased awareness.

If the measurement is whether the campaign strengthened Novig's standing with women in elite sport, the public reaction from a significant group of athletes tells a very different story.

Those are not contradictory findings.

They are different records of the same event.

And perhaps that is the more interesting story than the advertisement itself.

Modern organisations have become exceptionally good at measuring clicks, impressions, mentions, followers and conversions.

Reputation is harder.

It develops through actions, associations, responses and memory.

Something can perform brilliantly on the first set of measurements while quietly deteriorating on the second.

The internet remembers the exchange

Twenty years ago, a controversial television commercial eventually disappeared.

Today it acquires a permanent surrounding record.

The advertisement.

The criticism.

The company's explanation.

The celebrity's response.

The athletes' counter-response.

Thousands of public reactions.

Future audiences can encounter any part of that sequence first.

That changes the meaning of endorsement.

The question for brands is no longer simply:

Who can make people look at us?

It is increasingly:

What will people believe about us after they have looked?

Sydney Sweeney and Novig unquestionably made people look.

What remains unresolved — and may take considerably longer to determine — is what exactly all that attention has purchased.

Because in the attention economy, a campaign can disappear in seconds.

Its reputation does not necessarily leave with it.